Summary & Verdict On The Intel Core i7-8700K

The Intel Core i7-8700K is a breath of fresh air. Finally, Intel has a new processor worth boasting about. Thanks to the two additional cores, and the consequently larger L2 and L3 caches, it is significantly faster than its predecessor, even those built on the same microarchitecture and process technology.

The multi-core applications we tested just lapped up the extra cores and deliver significantly better performance. Even its single-core performance was improved, mostly due to the higher clock speed.

The Intel Core i7-8700K was 72% faster than the Core i7-6700K in 3D rendering

The Intel Core i7-8700K was 46% faster than the Core i7-6700K in video transcoding

The Intel Core i7-8700K was 57% faster than the Core i7-6700K in applying the radial blur filter

The Intel Core i7-8700K was 18% slower than the Core i7-6700K in Ashes of the Singularity

The Intel Core i7-8700K was 19% slower than the Core i7-6700K in Total War: Warhammer

The Intel Core i7-8700K was 3.4% slower than the Core i7-6700K in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

As those frame rates are heavily influenced by the graphics card, we think it is likely an issue with the motherboard. We will need to take more time to figure out what’s wrong. We will retest and update this review as soon as we can.

But based on the raw performance of the processor in the applications we tested, we feel safe to say that the Intel Core i7-8700K is definitely the Core i7 processor that Intel fans have been waiting for.